As a spaceship The vehicle gathered all the attention this week, the company Falcon 9 rocket 9 continued to have taken impressive steps.
The two have occurred during the relatively anonymous launches of the company’s starlink satellites, but are nevertheless notable because they highlight the value of reuse in the first stage, that SpaceX has been launched in the last decade.
The first milestone occurred Wednesday morning with the launch of the Cape Canaveral Starlink 10-56 mission in Florida. The first step which launched these satellites, Booster 1096, was its second launch and subsequently on the Just read the instructions Ship drone. Surprisingly, it was the 400th time that SpaceX executed in the drone ship.
Then, less than 24 hours later, another Falcon 9 rocket launched the Starlink 10-11 mission from a nearby launch pad at Kennedy Space Center. This first step, Booster 1067, has returned and landed on another drone ship, A lack of severity.
It is a special booster, having made its debut in June 2021 and launched a wide variety of missioni, including two crew dragon vehicles at the international space station and some Galileo satellites for the European Union. Thursday, the rocket made its 30th flight, the first time a Booster Falcon 9 reached this level of experience.
A decade of manufacturing
These milestones intervened about a decade after SpaceX began to have a sub-sous-tee-for with Rure in the first stage.
The company first made a controlled entry of the first stage of the Falcon 9 Rocket in September 2013, during the first flight in version 1.1 of the vehicle. This has proven the viability of the concept of supersonic retropulsion, which was, until this moment, just theoretical.
This implies the trigger of the nine merlin engines of the rocket while the vehicle moves faster than the speed of sound through the upper atmosphere, with external temperatures covering 1000 degrees Fahrenheit. Two to the blunt strength of this recent, the engines of the outside ring of the rocket wanted to be removed, the head of the propulsion of society at the time, Tom Mueller, told me for the book Back to school. Next time on the first try, seemed unlikely.
He remembers looking at this launch from the Vandenberg Space Force base in California and observing the recent as a camera on board the founder of the founder of SpaceX Elon Musk has pushed the rocket. The first step did all along the way, intact.
“I remember watching the video live and having seen the light of the engine on the ocean,” said Mueller. “And shit, it was there. The rocket went down, landed in the ocean and exploded. It was unreal. It is the first time.
It would take much more DIY and experience, but in December 2015, SpaceX had dropped its first rocket on a pad along the Florida coast. The first drone ship landing followed in April 2016. A little less that a year after that, SpaceX reflews in the Falcon 9 stage for the first time.
Silence skeptics
Many people in the industry were skeptical about the reuse of the SpaceX Approsa. In mid-2013, European and Japanese space agencies sought to develop their next generation of rockets. In both cases, Europe with Ariane 6 and Japan with H3, space agencies have opted for traditional and consumable rockets instead of pushing towards their rure.
As an answer, these two competitors for the launch of commercial satellites are now about a decade of delay on SpaceX in terms of Lamung technology. If the starship shelter rocket is later, this gap could widen more.
